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Make Room for More Suburbans

There could be 60,000 extra General Motors SUVs on American roads next year.

I want to say more, but first you should sit and let that marinate for a few seconds.

Sixty thousand additional Suburbans, Tahoes, Escalades, and more will choke our highways and suck down mad amounts of fuel, easily negating any environmental gains created by alternative-fuel cars.

This isn’t a tirade against fuel-thirsty SUVs—I happen to own one of the least efficient vehicles built in the last decade (a 2008 Audi Q7), which I need for family purposes. I’m just saying that 60,000 Suburbans is about 50 percent of the 119,000 electric cars sold in the U.S. in 2014. And those are just the *extra* SUVs GM plans to build.

Why is the American carmaker increasing production so much, and what does it mean?

The simple answer is because of demand. People keep buying Suburbans and Escalades, so GM will keep making them. We can read deeper and say that this extra production is a sign of economic recovery, or even make the argument that people are stretching to buy large SUVs because gas prices are still hovering at a relatively low $3 per gallon.

All those reasons are probably valid, and certainly all contribute to the fact that GM can’t build its SUVs fast enough. With this coming surge in supply, can buyers expect to find great deals on a new Suburban or Tahoe?

Probably not. There will be the usual incentives, but considering how buyers gobble up the big utes, I don’t foresee any gluts in supply. What I do see, probably three to five years in the future, are great deals on used 2016 Suburbans. Imagine if gas prices go up even just a little bit or if people struggle to make the mighty payment often associated with a large GM SUV. All those extra new vehicles today become tomorrow’s glut of unsold used inventory.

If you want the best deal on a 2016 General Motors SUV, buy it in 2021.